


The Queen and the Gardener

by krinaphobia



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: F/M, Help, I've never done this before, i don't know how to tag things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-05 00:44:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4159146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krinaphobia/pseuds/krinaphobia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hades likes his quiet kingdom, but Persephone is a force of nature coming to claim it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Queen and the Gardener

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first ever contribution to Ao3, so please forgive my inability to tag things!

He never envied his brothers. Not really. The rush of lightning and rumble of thunder, the eyes of all the Olympians, the warm embrace of countless mortal women, these were not things he desired. They did not suit him. Nor did the crushing weight of the ocean, the pounding of horses’ hooves, the great leviathans of the deep. Legend said he chose the short straw, but what god would make a mistake like that? Hades chose the dark and the quiet and the silence.

His world was simple. A hut of black stone sat beside a garden. He worked hard to gather enough ashes to create the small plot. Plants grew twisted in the dead soil, but he gave them trellises of bones to climb on, and water from the River Styx seeped into their roots. Souls gathered at the garden walls, looking in with eyes that consumed what little remained of their faces. But they were silent, and Hades found he did not mind.

In the world above, when his brothers and sisters demanded his presence, he wore a skeletal mask and a cloak of shadow. The chill of his dark home clung to him like a second skin, and it kept the others at bay. Silence was his armor and he maintained it at all times.

So when he found her waiting by the portal, he stopped and looked at her, wordless and waiting.

She held something out to him. A simple red pot filled with dirt. A tiny green vine wrapped around a stick in the soil.

“Take it,” she told him.

He did not move.

“I thought you might like it.” She held out her other hand, and he saw the blacked form of a leaf from one of his plants. “This fell from your cloak the last time you visited,” she said. “Everyone says it’s a barren wasteland down there, but you’re growing things. I know you are. So take it.”

He held out his hands and she put the pot into them. Gently, he touched a finger to the green vine, and it withered, blackened as if by an early frost. His hand shook slightly. Such a beautiful thing, and he destroyed it.

She sighed. “I thought that might happen.” She came closer and breathed gently on the plant. Hades felt the warmth on his skin. Green swept through the vine as life returned to it. She smiled up at him. “There. All better.”

He tried to give the plant back to her. It would not live where he was going, but she refused. “If you’re worried about it, I’ll come with you.”

He shook his head and tried to give her the plant.

“No, I insist. I’ll come with you. Your garden’s got to be a mess anyway. I want to help.”

The look in her eyes told him she would not be swayed. He wrapped her in his cloak and took her through the portal.

She talked throughout the journey. She said her name was Persephone and she was born too late, everything worth being goddess of had long been claimed. It was a strange thing, hearing a voice in his cavernous home. He had not realized how much the walls echoed, or how soundlessly the Styx flowed in its bed. Even Charon seemed rattled by the change, though he answered all her questions with a voice like a rusted chain scraping over rock.

She smiled when she saw his little hut. She said she could work with his garden. Hades watched as she touched every plant, breathing life into them. He was disappointed when they did not spring to full life as the little vine had, but she showed him how the stalks were a little stronger, the leaves a little fuller. He touched one of his favorites and marveled that it did not crumble under his hand. Then he turned and found her gone, over the garden wall and exploring.

The souls in particular caught her interest. Hades had never thought much of them, but she went wandering off into their midst. For a moment he thought he might lose her, and he chased after her, leaving his mask and cloak behind. But she glowed with a radiance so unlike the half-light of the souls that he easily found her.

“What do you do with them?” she asked. He did not answer, but he shrugged, feeling exposed.

“But they’re all here,” she insisted. “All of them together. Murderers and mothers, cowards and kings.”

Hades could not see the difference, but he watched her weave between the souls, touching them and seeing their past lives. Finally, she grabbed two souls and held them up in either hand. “You see? This man killed this woman’s children, and now here they are trapped together.”

Hades held up his hands, indicating the endless darkness around them.

She understood. “You’re right. We must build places to put them.”

They agreed, wordlessly on his part, that the garden was the place to begin. He cast down the walls and she caused the plants to spread. It was slow at first, as if the seedlings themselves were uncertain. Then they burst into life, full and glorious, and Hades watched in wonder as lush fields spread through his domain. The Elysian Fields, she named them, and her warmth was captured in the words. They sat together and watched the first timid souls stepping onto the grass.

Hades rested his head on Persephone’s, only to find she was no longer there. Her disappearances, always flitting here or there, were now familiar but no less startling. He looked around and saw that she had found the soul of the man who had killed the woman’s family. He had tried to enter the fields, but Persephone threw him back into the shadows.

Hades put his hand on her shoulder, a question in his touch.

“This is a place for the good, not the wicked,” she said.

Hades had never thought of such a thing. A person’s deeds in life was not part of his domain. But he knew the look in her eyes and let her continue.

She devised punishments with such eagerness and cruelty that Hades would have been considered had he not understood that her viciousness was simply another facet of her endless energy. There was no halfway with Persephone. She was all-loving or all-destroying. A beautiful maiden or a fanged beast. She was sound and light and life and death.

Hades was nothing beside her. A shadow in a tattered cloak.

He did not even tell her he was going. He went through the portal and out into the world above.

The first thing he noticed was the cold. Even in sunlight, the air had a bite to it more reminiscent of home than the world of his brothers and sisters. He wandered through the forest, looking at the bare branches of the tress. They reached toward the sky in a desperate plea for warmth and rain that would not come.

Hades noticed he was not alone.

“Where is she?” Demeter demanded of him. Even the branches woven into her hair were dull and brown. “You stole her from me!”

Hades shook his head and looked back at the trees. A single leaf, wrinkled as Chiron’s face, drifted past him and he caught it.

“Return her at once,” his sister told him.

Hades studied the leaf. Persephone had to return.

He found her in the palace she had built where his hut once stood. Souls awaiting judgement drifted through, watching him with their empty eyes.

She stood on a balcony, overlooking the fields, and she turned when he approached. He held out his hand, showing her the leaf he had caught.

“This is from the world above?” She took it from him, and it crumbled in her hands. She threw the dust over the balcony. “Whatever my mother told you, I’m not going back.”

He held out his hand to her, a portal opening behind him.

“No! I won’t go back!”

Hades stepped aside and showed her the dead landscape of the world above.

“That isn’t where I belong. I belong here now.”

There was something different about her, he noticed now. A change in the glow of her skin. He stepped forward and brushed his fingers against her cheek. Her skin was cool to the touch.

“That plant you like so much,” she said, “it grew a fruit and I ate it. I belong here now. This is my kingdom.”

Hades stepped away, shaking his head. It was not right to see her changed. It was like a vine withering in his hand. He could have stopped her. He could have at least tried.

Persephone took his hand gently between her own. “This is my choice,” she said, and he felt some relief that her voice was as gentle and terrible as it had ever been. “This is what I want.” Then she sighed. “But I should have told you. It’s your kingdom too, after all.”

Hades paused. He looked around at the palace she had built, the fields she had created, the distant fires that burned the souls she damned. Persephone saw, and she smiled. “Come with me.”

She took him down to what remained of his garden, to the stone remaining of the original wall, on which grew his favorite plant. It had indeed produced fruits, and Persephone picked one and opened it causing seeds like rubies to spill out. She put three in his hand.

“This is your creation,” she said.

He shook his head and tried to give the seeds back to her. There were hers, as was all else in this world.

Persephone did not take the seeds. Instead she knelt and scooped up some of the soil in which the plants grew. It slipped between her fingers, ashes drifting delicately downwards.

“A seed is nothing without soil to grow in. I was a seed and you gave me a world where I could flourish.”

Hades reached out with his empty hand and cupped her cheek. She leaned into his touch. Carefully, he ate the seeds.

Persephone laughed, a siren promising desire and doom, and Hades found, as ever, he could not refuse her.

His world was not as quiet, or as simple. The darkness was not absolute. But his garden, like his queen, grew stronger and more beautiful by the day. He maintained the soil for her, and she understood. His devotion was one of action, not words, and she embraced it and him as absolutely as she did everything.

She was the queen who loved without mercy, and he was her gardener, who loved with out end.

 


End file.
